ShareYourBlues.com Server Migration

Up until recently ShareYourBlues.com Elgg powered community was hosted on shared Godaddy account but as user-base grew site was loading slow and gave internal server error on several occasions. We knew immediately that it was time to move to better server but we did not have many options as budget would not allow for a Dedicated server with at least 2GB RAM and we still needed to run Apache and MySQL too. Anything less than Dedicated will not be sufficient or that’s what we thought.

The solution was Nginx with MySQL on mid-size VPS with 2GB of RAM and 2 CPUs. We migrated the whole site with almost 200 users and all data files to new server, replicated and adjusted database, made final file adjustments than changed DNS records on domain and it was ready to rock. The results were amazing, WebPage Test showed page loading speed improvement of 11 seconds. That was pretty impressive performance for a Elgg site that was so slow running on shared Godaddy server.

With half the cost of cheapest Dedicated server we are getting almost the same performance with cheaper VPS running Nginx. We drastically improved website performance and still stayed on budget.